Scholars Question Accuracy of Transcribed Frost Notebooks

Robert Faggen, professor and chairman of the English department at
Claremont McKenna College in California, has come under scrutiny for
his transcription of Robert Frost's papers collected in The Notebooks of Robert Frost,
published by Harvard University Press last January. According to two
critics, the compilation of forty-seven of Frost's notebooks contains
hundreds of errors.

James Sitar, the archive editor of the Poetry Foundation's Web site, published an article in Essays and Criticism
in October 2007 stating that he compared four of Frost's original
notebooks, stored in Boston University's archives, to Faggen's work,
and found "roughly one thousand" inaccuracies in the transcription.

William
Logan, an English professor at University of Florida, also discovered
discrepancies while reviewing thirty pages of Frost's notebooks from
the Dartmouth archives. In an article forthcoming in Parnassus
in March, Logan writes, "To read this volume is to believe that Frost
was a dyslexic and deranged speller, that his brisk notes frequently
made no sense, that he often traded the expected word for some fanciful
or perverse alternative."

The notebooks, which Frost
did not intend for publication, are written in a scrawling penmanship
obscured further by edits, making the work difficult to decipher. In
response to the criticism, Faggen has said, "Any project of this nature
and magnitude is bound to invite criticism and undergo changes and
improvements, a great many of which have been incorporated into the
forthcoming paperback edition," the New York Times reported yesterday.

Harvard
University Press is planning to publish several additional collections
of Frost's unpublished work, including his letters and lectures, which
will be edited and transcribed by Faggen and others.